


The fruits of victory

by sternflammenden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 22:58:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternflammenden/pseuds/sternflammenden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the got_exchange comment fic meme on LiveJournal.</p><p>Prompt:  Walda + Rickon, Crack post war fic. Where Rickon decides that he likes Walda and her kid (Roose and Ramsay are sayonara ofc) and that she can keep the Dreadfort if she makes perpetual jam for Winterfell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The fruits of victory

**Author's Note:**

> It’s my headcanon that Mariya and Ami don’t make it through the war so Walda basically adopts her little sister. I am also an idiot and aged her down. Apparently Marissa is "a maid of thirteen" according to the book indices. Whatever.

Rickon Stark, Lord of Winterfell, is currently tearing through the great hall of the Dreadfort with his direwolf, brandishing a rather wicked looking flaying knife. It is rusted and dull from lack of use, but it is still dangerous. Walda doesn’t panic, but grabs his arm and stills his hand. She does not wonder where he found it, for the holdfast yields small horrors every day. Just yesterday she’d found a dagger brown with old blood in the stables, and had tossed it in the forge to be melted down without a second thought. 

“My Lord,” she says, inclining her head, “give that to me.” Her voice isn’t unkind, but it’s firm. Walda’s only grown more serious since the war passed through her life, biting back the urge to weep or to cringe in fear, and when Rickon’s fingers open, almost against his will, she takes the horrid thing and thrusts it deep into the pockets of her skirts. “You’ll only cut yourself, and we certainly don’t want that, do we?”

He scowls, his face almost too serious for such a little boy, but then again, he is the heir, the Lord, the Stark in Winterfell, and by all rights, Walda and her household are to bend the knee to him. But instead, he has turned her home into a shambles, he and this oversized beast, playing at some odd game whose rules, if any, she can only guess at. The Wildling woman ( _No_ , Walda thinks then, _They are the Free Folk now._ ) who had brought him and his companion to the Dreadfort whiles away the visit in the yard, speaking to her men, the few retainers of House Bolton who remain, examining with grudging admiration the glass houses that she has had constructed, the garden that, despite the rocky soil and chill in the air, blooms almost defiantly where once soldiers drilled, where once there was death. 

But now there is life. 

Walda doesn’t want to think about death. She’s had enough of that. Her black dress speaks as to how much of that has twined around her, but her eyes are dry, and her voice is sweet, not hoarse from weeping. 

“My Lord,” Walda says, an idea dawning on her, “would you care for some jam?”

Rickon looks at her. “Jam,” he says. “We don’t have that at home.”

Walda smiles then. “It all shall be at your disposal, my Lord,” she says, taking his hand and leading him into the kitchens, where he sits at a low trestle table, rough-hewn yet beautifully functional, as Walda brings out several crocks. “Here is blackberry,” she says, uncorking the first. “Raspberry,” for the second, and “Sour apple butter” for the last, and she cuts a thick slab of bread from a loaf. 

Rickon peers into one of the jars, and Walda gently interrupts him, handing him a silver instrument. “Now here is a knife more suited to you,” she says solemnly, “clean and too dull to slice you to ribbons.”

Rickon ignores it and instead thrusts his hand into the nearest jar, raspberry, and shoves the sticky contents into his mouth. He sucks his fingers with an odd sort of relish, a defiant expression on her face. 

Walda shrugs, allowing it. After all, who is she to question her lord’s lack of table manners?

When he clicks his fingers at the great beast, calling it onto the bench beside him, Walda takes it in in much the same manner. And she is not insulted when he permits the wolf to stick his muzzle in sour apple butter, or when he feeds it with his hands. They are both a disgustingly sticky mess, although Shaggydog does his part to clean his master, licking the jam from his face. 

“Sansa wouldn’t let me do this. She’s always saying _Not at the table!_ ” he says, pitching his voice high in a terrible impression of Lady Stark, who is always the picture of dignity and poise, at least on the few occasions that Walda has seen her. “And then they make Shaggy lie under the bench, _like a gentleman_ ,” he continues with his japery. 

“You are my guest, Lord Rickon,” Walda says then, giggling at the sight despite herself, “and you must do as you like while you are here.” She checks herself, remembering the weapon in her pocket. “Unless, of course, you should come to harm. We would not want that to come to pass.” 

She has almost forgotten the reason that the child had come. As the Stark in Winterfell, it was his decision to allow her to remain in the Dreadfort. After all, she and the baby were the only surviving Bolton heirs. Walda did worry; after all, where else would she go? There was nothing left of her family in the North, and the Twins would most certainly not welcome her back, after Roose Bolton had finally fallen.

But she wouldn’t think about that right now. 

“I like it here,” Rickon declares then. “There aren’t a lot of silly rules. And you have jam. We don’t have that at Winterfell, not now.” But he trailed off, his face almost sad. 

Walda smiled. How could she have forgotten that despite his position, he was still a little boy? And he was almost of an age with Marissa, who had been sent to practice her letters, in the event that things went badly. Walda only wanted to shield the child. 

“There _are_ rules,” she said gently. “And my first rule is that you may have as much jam as you like. Why don’t you take some home with you, Lord Rickon?”

He grinned then, but slowly. “As much as I like?”

Walda nodded, wiping a stray gob of jam from his cheek that Shaggydog had been remiss in cleaning. “As much as you like.”

When her maid brings her the baby for his feeding, she turns, holding her son close as he gives suck, but Rickon watches her and the child intently. 

“Does he have a name?” 

The baby, sated, drowses in Walda’s arms, and she bends to kiss his rounded cheek. 

“You should name him Davos.” 

“His name is Domeric,” she says. It had really been her idea to name the child after her husband’s first heir, and although Roose had not lived to see his son’s birth, Walda believes that he would have approved. The baby is a docile and sweet thing, with his father’s eyes, and his mother’s smile. 

“Davos is a better name than that,” Rickon says then, determinedly. “The best captain in the Seven Kingdoms.”

Walda of course knew of the Lord of the Rainwood, one of the heroes of the Great War, and how he had journeyed to Skagos, of all places, to seek out this strange little boy. “I am sure that he is,” she says, “and when you have sons, you should honor him thus.”

Rickon only smiles, and reaches a tentative hand out to her child. “Careful,” Walda says softly, but the child is gentle, and Domeric smiles, grabbing Rickon’s finger in a fist. Their laughter mingles and for the first time in a long while, things feel like home again. 

When Osha comes to fetch him, Rickon carries a large jar and orders her to take up the other that sits on the table. 

“I want to visit Lady Walda again,” he said to the woman, “and soon. She’s going to make jam for us until the glass houses are rebuilt.”

Walda watches them go, filled with relief.

***

And later that evening when she put Marissa to bed, the little girl asked her about Lord Stark. 

“We are to make jam for Lord Stark’s household,” Walda told her, “and won’t that be fun?”

Marissa loved helping to pick the berries in the glass houses, darting in and out of the vines and in the low limbs of the apple and peach trees that were just beginning to bear small and stunted fruit, and even if she was too small to help Walda and her ladies with the boiling, she loved to label each jar, her shaky child’s penmanship improving with each one, her drawing lessons with the Septa put to the test as she impressed pictures of the contents around their titles, to benefit the kitchen boys who could not read. 

Marissa nodded, “Yes,” she said sleepily, “so much fun. Is he really a little boy?”

“Yes, a little boy with a large wolf.”

Her sister looked interested, but tired. “I must play with him when next he comes. Do boy lords play, do you think?”

Walda pulled the covers tight around the child. “I think that this one might,” and she pressed her lips to Marissa’s forehead, leaving the child to her innocence, and her dreams. 

When she is alone, in her rooms, she draws out her husband’s ring, a signet with the sigil of his house, now forbidden, and presses it to her lips. “I suppose we are safe then,” she says softly. Walda is not sure exactly who she is talking to, or why she has kept this relic, but the weight of it about her neck and the cool press of the metal against her bare skin comforts her. It is a reminder of being raised high, of her fear of things that lurked perilously close in the shadows, of a silent, queer lord who made her his bride and despite everything, had shown her every kindness. She drops it down the front of her nightdress again, lying in her bed, closing her eyes against the memories. 

“Safe,” she says again before she sleeps.


End file.
